FROM AN AUTUMN JOURNAL
35
But
in
part they are also his felt ideas. They are the ideas he believes
he
ought
to hold, as a man of probity.
Also he is a scientist, though in fields remote from military
needs, and his talk is peculiarly the talk of the progressive-minded
man of his profession. I am constantly struck, among the chemists,
the physicists, the geneticists, the biologists I meet, by the occupa–
tional disability to apply to politics the discipline they must regularly
exercise in their own subjects. Almost in the degree these people
are personally decent and generous, their politics are, to my mind,
tainted. There was the evening last spring, for instance, we spent
talking politics with a most distinguished American physicist. It didn't
bother him, he said, that Russia had moved into Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Rumania. It didn't bother him that China had gone
Communist. "What I care about is my own country. vVe can't go
on antagonizing Russia this way without getting into trouble. We
can't go on arming at this rate without antagonizing Russia." One
of the luminaries of his profession who, incidentally, has sat on many
government boards which help determine policy in the spheres where
science and diplomacy now meet, is alarmingly unable to extend
into politics his magnificent powers of reason.
I discuss this with the G.'s and we come to the conclusion,
based on our joint experience, that scientists are not only unequal to
the policy-making responsibilities which have suddenly been thrust
on them but that perhaps they are even unqualified to vote. We
devise a minimal program for self-protection: the franchise shall
be denied anyone who has taken more than
16
points in the sciences,
unless he can also show
an
A average in the humanities. But no
doubt we give the humane disciplines a credit which they too have
failed to earn.
November 28
... I am reminded of the friend I once heard asked whether
her family had had a real Thanksgiving dinner. "Yes," she replied.
"With all the fixations." Thus with ourselves- a real Thanksgiving
dinner, with all the fixations. And yet, squirm and complain as I
will, the two or three years we managed to duck out from under
the usual routine I felt a great hole at the center of the festivities,
